I Dreamed a Dream
by Peres
Summary: "There is no need to mask the feelings I stir in you. I see what dances in your thoughts as you dream the slow hours of the day away... do not think your mind has not laid down paths for me to stroll." A brief look at the perils of writing fanfic about a dreamwalker.


**Author's note: For steamboy, in memory of a certain late-night conversation and a shared obsession.**

I once told a friend that I was addicted to unreality. Movies, books, video games; I wasn't fussy about exactly which form my escape from mundane, everyday life took. It was a poor choice of words, really. He didn't understand, and, I realised later, it wasn't exactly what I'd meant to say.

What I love is _narrative_. Story. The shape and pattern and flow of words, ideas, images. Unforgettable characters in their own, different worlds, treading a path which leads clearly, almost inevitably, from their beginning to their end. The very best of these, the ones I love best, I revisit time and time again. I reread, or rewatch, or replay until I can predict every word. I never tire of it.

When I finished high school, I chose to study writing at university. I learnt about _the Hero's Journey_ and _Three-Act Structure _– well, I learnt the labels for concepts I had recognised as old friends. I mention this not to boast (if it is actually something to boast about) but so you understand that I do know a story when I encounter one.

It wasn't a story. It was just _a thing that happened._

But if you are to understand the _thing that happened_, you will need a little more background.

I got my degree in writing, with an Honours in Creative Communication (academic-speak for a thesis made up of poems about mythical beasts), and I had absolutely no idea what to do with it. Actually, I still don't, which is why I'm still working as a receptionist at a hairdresser's by day, and spending nights immersed in my books and computer games.

It must've been only a couple of years ago that I first played the second Neverwinter Nights game. Apart from that endless first act (and the fact I couldn't romance Sand), I loved it; but it was the expansion, _Mask of the Betrayer_, that really caught my imagination.

I can't say why, exactly. I wasn't a huge fan of the spirit-eater mechanic (although I didn't hate it as vehemently as my brother did; he plays Chaotic Evil, while I tend towards Chaotic Good) but I had to admit, it was a great piece of motivation and impetus for the player character. The characters were fascinating people. The setting was superb, from the claustrophobia of the Skein to the beauty of the Ashenwood, helped by the atmospheric music.

But I could say similar things for _Elder Scrolls_, or _Dragon Age, _or the _Mass Effect _series (just to name a few computer games, and completely ignore all the books and movies), and none of them ever inspired me to write fanfiction, much less a nearly finished 130-thousand word epic. I'm not sure why. I don't even know if it was a cause of the _thing that happened_ or an effect.

I should also admit, at this point, that I have obsessive fangirl tendencies. I have played _Dragon Age 2_ ... ah, five times now. Only once have I romanced anyone other than Fenris (and even then, I only turned to Anders after my elf walked out on me). I bought a Garrus figurine from eBay, and he sits beside my computer and snipes viruses for me. It probably doesn't surprise you to learn that I... well, you know, Gann is almost pure fan service, and I fell for it.

Never mind. You're here (if you are, still) to read about the _thing that happened. _

It was only a couple of nights ago. I went to bed, rather later than I should have, if I'm honest. I was puzzling over the conversation I wanted Gann and Tarva (my PC) to have before marching off to the Fugue Plane, which is usually what I do before falling asleep lately. It worked as well as usual, and as often happens, I slipped from waking thought to dreaming easily.

One moment I was imagining Tarva presenting her case coherently, and the next they were blocking my TV screen (I think it was showing something about flying fish and peanut butter) and Gann was calling her Verity.

It's hard to transcribe dreams, you know. They follow their own logic, their own rules; trying to capture them in daylight terms will only ever partially exceed. I mean, I can tell you all about the time the Prime Minister of Australia stood me up for a job interview on the top of a mountain, but I can't convey how natural it all seemed at the time, how easily it all led from one moment to the next, and how little agency, how little choice I had in the matter. Your waking self has no power or understanding of your dreams.

So it is only in retrospect that it seems peculiar that Gann turned and looked at me. He studied me, from bare feet to faded flannel pyjamas, and a smile crept over that ridiculously handsome blue face. "Well, look at you."

There's not much to look at. Often, in a dream, I'm someone or something different, but this time I was just myself – mousy hair, big nose, more than slightly overweight. Certainly nothing that Gann would choose to look at twice.

"What are you doing here?" I stared at the tall figure dressed in leathers and furs, blue-skinned, his hair longer than mine and coloured like old silver. He should have seemed unreal, fantastic, against my TV and DVD shelves; instead the juxtaposition brought him sharply into focus, and it was the banal and everyday background that looked false.

"I came to see you. Your dreams... they called to me."

I think I scoffed at him. I do remember saying something that amounted to "My dreams called you all the way from another fictional world to my living room?"

"Yes," he said, as though it was the most obvious thing in this or any world. "You dream so often of me, and so _passionately_... of course I was curious. No, do not shake your head." I had begun to do just that. "I see what dances in your thoughts as you dream the slow hours of the day away, the words you twine so carefully about me. When you wake, when you lay yourself down to dream; when you work and talk and laugh, I am never far from your thoughts. Are you surprised that your mind has laid down paths for me to stroll?"

"You're not real," I told him. Clearly tact was not my strong point in the dream, or maybe I was surprised. I really don't know.

"Not in the same way you are," he allowed. "You are flesh and blood, and I – I am but an idea, a stray thought, that had to fend for itself in a land very different from yours. That doesn't make me any less real than you." He turned to my DVD shelves and tapped the spine of _Inception_. "I know you are familiar with the resilience of ideas, with their power and their reality."

"And that of dreams."

He tossed his hair out of his eyes. "And dreams. Once, many years ago, you dreamed of wings. So strong was your dream that even once you woke, you could feel the weight of the feathers you no longer possessed. You knew how to tilt them, how to fill them with the wind and let them lift you. You could fly." His eyes, a piercing green that was as strange and unnatural as his blue skin (but still, no less attractive for that), were oddly kind as he said, "And the loss you felt when you knew your wings were but a trick of your dreaming haunts you still."

"I don't think you're playing fair," I said. "You're inside my head and you know everything I keep there. I don't get the same kind of insight into you."

"Of course you do," he laughed at me. "I am _your_ Gann. The one whose very thoughts you record in your writing. I am not the Gann Obsidian created; I am not even the Gann of your friend steamboy." He considered that for a moment. "Well, I would be if it were her dream I'd entered."

Dreaming, I boggled over that a bit. Writing this now, it makes as much sense as any of this does – which, I'll admit, isn't a great deal. Probably that's why I stubbornly repeated, "You're not real."

He was a lot closer to me than he had been, and I don't remember seeing him move. There was something in his eyes that I shall categorise now as wistful – but I don't know if that's the right word, or even if I remember this fragment of a very confusing dream correctly. "I am, Katherine, precisely as real as you allow me to be. As you _want _me to be."

Somehow that scared me, but not as I understand the emotion when I'm awake. It wasn't a threat or anything; even the fact that he used my name didn't concern me. It was just... well, I don't know.

Even so, I answered precisely as I would while awake, assuming I was being brutally honest. "I prefer you as a fantasy. Your eyes, your skin, your hair... they're attractive in dreams, but they're a little strange for the waking world. And your womanising, your small callousnesses, even your ability to walk in dreams... they don't bother me in a fantasy, in a dream, but if we met in reality, I'd be wary of a man like you."

"Come now, that's hardly fair." He almost smiled. "These behaviours of mine that you find so offensive... they're a thing of the past. You changed them. You changed me. For the better, I think."

"_Tarva _did."

"And who created her? Whose love, whose desire inspired her to tame a wild hagspawn?"

"_Tarva_ loves you. Me... I'm just a little infatuated. Obsessed, maybe."

"Ah, but you are not entirely different people. You are the truth at her core." He moved closer, until few inches separated us. I couldn't move back – or it didn't occur to me at the time. He looked down at me. "You gave her your eyes. Large, dark, blue. Beautiful. Everything you don't say is written in their depths." His fingertip traced a delicate line over my cheekbone, and I shivered. "Other things, too. You gave her your way of listening and your silences. Even your –"

"Don't," I interrupted him, knowing what he'd say. Even in a dream I didn't want to hear it.

"Even some of your defences. So why, I wonder," a smirk arranging his mouth in new and equally pleasing lines, "didn't you give her your lips?"

I know I tried, and failed, to say anything coherent at that point.

"Their shape, their curves... the small imperfections here..." He touched the funny, jagged dent at the top. It should have been a small thing. It wasn't. "It was selfish of you to keep them to yourself." His head lowered, as did his voice when he added, "I think I'll fix that."

And he kissed me.

I've kissed, and been kissed, before. I'll be honest, here; it was always a little disappointing. Pleasant, yes: passionate, sometimes. But there was always a calm, cold little thought in the back of my head that asked: _Is that it? What a funny thing for people to do_. Maybe everyone thinks that, I don't know. Maybe it had something to do with the relative inexperience of everyone involved. I mean, my second boyfriend was an ex-seminarian. Maybe it was simply that, while I had liked them a great deal, I was never particularly attracted to anyone I'd kissed.

Absolutely none of that applied to Gann, of course.

And all that is me rationalising now, trying to explain a dream. At the time, there was just one little thought, and it was something like: _Ah. Finally. _That's _what all the fuss is abou-_

But I couldn't hold onto coherent thought – I lacked even the will to try.

I can't even now, describe Gann's kiss properly. I cannot tell you whether he was tender or forceful, passionate or gentle, or all of them at once. I cannot tell you how I responded, what either of us did with our hands, how close he held me; what it felt like, how it made me feel. It has all faded, as dreams do on waking.

In one moment, he was looking at me, an expression which mixed both self-congratulation and surprise in his green eyes –

- and in the next, I was staring at my bedroom ceiling, and a magpie was warbling joyously from a nearby tree.

So, that's it. There's no ending, no conclusion. I haven't dreamed of Gann again, and progress on my story about him continues as usual. Prosaically, I have tried to chalk it up to an overactive imagination. Sometimes I succeed, and sometimes I think I am lying to myself.

It remains nothing more or less than a _thing that happened_, in one sense or another, and I am sure of only one thing.

I wouldn't mind if it happened again.


End file.
